Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [127]
I am trying very hard not to be terrified. When the doctor taps my knee with his rubber-tipped hammer, there’s real and immediate reflex, where three months before my lifeless leg had merely remained still, the reactive nerve pinched off by the rupture in my spine. And looking at the CAT scan and at me, the doctor pronounces me a terrible candidate for surgery, since I am obviously healing myself.
Ironing a shirt, I find myself thinking of Lynda, of a late winter day—how many, three, four years ago? She’s staying in a little waterfront apartment in the West End where she’s come to write, and visits us every day. Wally is tired, already, his long days of resting on the folding couch begun, and Lynda and I’ve gone to town for an afternoon walk, and to see what stores are open. Not many, but the reliable oriental imports store is lit and occupied, as it almost always is, and inside we find that the owner’s just received a shipment of kimonos, bales of old ones bought in bulk in Japan. They’ve been dry cleaned but neither pressed nor sorted, and they lie in great heaps of wrinkled, richly textured silk. Here are sleeves of oyster and pearl and smoke, linings patterned with flurries of chrysanthemums or undulations of watery swirls. Laughing at the bounty, overcome by the crumpled luxury, we’re trying on robe after robe, playing with things we never would (or could) wear: gossamer sleeves like white moths or frail ghosts, costumes for a Japanese Midsummer Night’s Dream, tousled fields of sheen the color of hayfields. The owner—who seems himself to enjoy our pleasure in his tumble of wares—gives us a deal, and eventually we settle on three: a short deep blue for Lynda, lined with a secretive orange splendor of flowers; a long scholarly gray for me, severe, slightly pearly, meditative; a rough raw silk for Wally, its thickly textured green weave the color of day-old clippings clinging to lawn mower blades.
Our afternoon, home in the kitchen, is a festival of ironing, of steam and surprise as wrinkles fall away and the drape and soft shine of the fabric reveal themselves. It’s raining out and the windows steam up, the room warmed by our work and the heat of our coffee. All three of us are chatting and ironing and happy, wrapping ourselves in our new old robes, thinking of the mulberry leaves spun by silkworms to this unlikely filament, of the endless labor of unwinding the cocoons, of the subtlety and strength of the colors the densely woven stuff is dyed, of our own collaboration, as ironers, in the restoration of beauty. The steam and the rain on the kitchen’s new french doors make us feel safe, domestic, inside some familiar childhood place of warmth and good company.
This memory has about it an aura of intimacy, of an achieved, common warmth—something like what Michael Anania has called, describing the process of reading, “a calm exchange of privacies.” It has the time-out-of-time sheen of happiness to it, subtle but unmistakable as the surface of those silks.
So much about Lynda is coming back to me now, as if my subsiding anger made room for the larger sense of who she was to reassert itself. How richly my friend made a life for herself; how much I enjoyed her company. She’d manage to be intimate and vulnerable, jazzy and alive, trashy and fun and then achingly and sharply smart, a more incisive thinker than anyone I knew. She was like the elegant, complicated surfaces of her poems: wrought to vibrant life, almost jeweled, no matter how difficult the experiences they described.
That tension between form and content was Lynda, in a way—all her glamour’s sly or gorgeous gestures lovely because we could see through them to the